Parker Pours It All Out In No-frills Show

If Graham Parker's aim on his current tour is to sell his new boxed set, he came on stage at Toad's Place in New Haven Thursday night as lightly packed as a traveling salesman.

With three guitars, four glasses of water, two harmonica racks, an amplifier and a microphone, the singer with no current record contract went promptly to work on a 90-minute, 24-song retrospective of his career, starting with three songs from his first album, from 1976.

The Eastern part of his tour is elsewhere supplemented with the La Bamba and the Hubcaps horn section, adding some of the original sass to his early, horn-driven works. But Toad's didn't want to spring for the extra personnel, which ended up being a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy -- only a few hundred came out to the tables-and-chairs format to hear Parker.

Although some songs struggled to be interpreted in such a bare-bones manner, it was still a fine show of the remarkable string of songs he has produced over the last 17 years. Part of the problem is that Parker, at 43, doesn't necessarily change his approach when reworking his blasting songs into solo numbers.

Unlike Bruce Springsteen, an early Parker champion, who reworks his own full band songs with thoughtful, quieter solos, Parker blasts with the same intensity as if he had the band with him. It's up to the fan to fill in mentally the piano parts to "Howlin' Wind," or the swelling background on "Fools' Gold."

Like Billy Bragg's troubadour act with an electric guitar, some songs sounded better in this format, including the back-to-back "Empty Lives" and "Wake Up Next to You" -- one a "hate thing," the other a "love thing," he explained, the latter of which included a snippet of Smokey Robinson's "Tears of a Clown." The final "You Can't Be Too Strong," an affecting post-abortion song, packed more raw power in the unfettered approach.

A lot of Parker's songs about modern life can be heard as cranky rants, from the descriptions in "Big Man on Paper" of the Hudson Valley Mall (where kids are wearing Mudhoney T-shirts now and "Gap store versions of grunge") to his "Museum of Stupidity."

But his own observations in "Soul Corruption" are beginning to meld with the Bob Marley "Crazy Baldheads" he blends it with.

And though he was snarling about the sound problems, he recognized that the crowd wasn't there to hear that sort of rant. Wearing a Ren and Stimpy T-shirt beneath his vest, he chuckled as he botched a very simple solo on the opening "White Honey" so he stopped to play that part all over once the song was over.

His more recent songs, already written in a more basic style, translated well to the format. "Strong Winds," "Get Started, Start a Fire" and "Back in Time" were among the evening's many highlights.

New Haven's Gravel Pit was perfectly suited to be the opener, with its smart and melodic new songs working well in an acoustic format